We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry.

It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.

I almost want to continue reading this as: “Yet, you’re all still stuck on our silo and we intend to keep taking a percentage for keeping you in business…”

If they were really all-in on helping the way they’re signaling here, they would be building it in a decentralized way that allows creators to take their patrons with them to another platform. They would also be expanding on features, which they don’t seem to be doing much of. I get the need to watch the bottom line and work on scaling, but they should also continue innovating and experimenting, particularly for the smaller fish who could become bigger fish.

One of my goals in 2018 is to own my reading data rather than using Goodreads for all of that information. This will allow me to track information the way I want rather than have to do it like Goodreads wants me to.

Welcome to the club. It seems like there’s a growing interest in owning read posts lately. Doing a 100 day experiment seems like a brilliant way to self-dogfood it while simultaneously getting more material read. I may have to steal the idea!

Over the weekend we hosted the first IndieWebCamp in Austin. I’m really happy with the way the event came together. I learned a lot in helping plan it, made a few mistakes that we can improve next time, but overall came away as inspired as ever to keep improving Micro.blog so that it’s a standout platform of the IndieWeb movement.
There’s nothing like meeting in person with other members of the community. I know this from attending Apple developer conferences, but the weekend in Austin only underscored that I should be more active in the larger web community as well.

Without all the jargon, we’re actually using our own websites to carry on a back and forth threaded conversation in a way that completely makes sense.

In fact, other than that our conversation is way over the 280 character limit imposed by Twitter, the interaction was as easy and simple from a UI perspective as it it is on Twitter or even Facebook. Hallelujah!

This is how the internet was meant to work!

A hearty thanks to those who’ve made this possible! It portends a sea-change in how social media works.

I really like Barnes’ intent to share. I just wonder if there is a means of owning these notes. Ideally, taking a POSSE approach, she might live blog and post this to Twitter. I vaguely remember Chris Aldrich sharing something about this recently, but the reference escapes me. This is also limited with her blog being located at WP.com. I therefore wondered about the option of pasting the content of the tweets into a blog as an archive.

Aaron, the process I use for taking longer streams of Tweets to own them (via PESOS) has Kevin Marks‘ excellent tool Noter Live at its core. Noter Live allows you to log in via Twitter and tweet(storm) from it directly. As its original intent was for live-tweeting at conferences and events, it has some useful built in tools for storing the names of multiple speakers (in advance, or even quickly on the fly) as well as auto-hashtagging your conversation. (I love it so much I took the time to write and contribute a user-manual.)

The best part is that it not only organically threads your tweets together into one continuing conversation, but it also gives you a modified output including the appropriate HTML and microformats classes so that you can cut and paste the entire thread and simply dump it into your favorite CMS and publish it as a standard blog post. (It also strips out the hashtags and repeated speaker references in a nice way.) With a small modification, you can also get your site to add hovercards to your post as well. I’ll also note in passing that it’s also been recently updated to support the longer 280 characters too.

Another shorter tweetstorm which also has u-syndication links for all of the individual tweets can be found at Indieweb and Education Tweetstorm. This one has the benefit of pulling in all the resultant conversations around my tweetstorm with backfeed from Brid.gy, though they’re not necessarily threaded properly in the comments the way I would ultimately like. As you mention in the last paragraph that having the links to the syndicated copies would be useful, I’ll note that I’ve already submitted it as an issue to Noter Live’s GitHub repo. In some sense, the entire Twitter thread is connected, so having the original tweet URL gives you most of the context, though it isn’t enough for all of the back feed by common methods (Webmentions+Brid.gy) presently.

I’ll also note that I’ve recently heard from a reputable source about a WordPress specific tool called Publishiza that may be useful in this way, but I’ve not had the chance to play with it yet myself.

Clearly, you can embed Tweets, often by adding the URL. However, there are more and more people deleting their Tweets and if you embed something that is deleted, this content is then lost. (Not sure where this leaves Storify etc.)

It’s interesting that you ask where this leaves Storify, because literally as I was reading your piece, I got a pop-up notification announcing that Storify was going to be shut down altogether!! (It sounds to me like you may have been unaware when you wrote your note. So Storify and those using it are in more dire circumstances than you had imagined.)

Storify announces it will disappear from the web on May 16, 2018. Once a core part of social-focused journalism projects like @acarvin‘s work, it’s larger archives and URLs will be gone. https://t.co/9KhEYCbX2e

It’s yet another reason in a very long list why one needs to have and own their own digital presence.

As for people deleting their tweets, I’ll note that by doing a full embed (instead of just using a URL) from Twitter to WordPress (or using Noter Live), that the original text is preserved so that even if the original is deleted, a full archival copy of the original still exists.

Also somewhat related in flavor for the mechanism you’re discussing, I also often use Hypothesis to comment on, highlight, and annotate on web pages for academic/research uses. To save these annotations, I’ll add hashtags to the annotations within Hypothesis and then use Kris Shaffer’s excellent Hypothesis Aggregator plugin to parse the data and pull it in the specific parts I want. Though here again, either Hypothesis as a service or the plugin itself may ultimately fail, so I will copy/paste the raw HTML from its output to post onto my site for future safekeeping. In some sense I’m using the plugin as a simple tool to make the transcription and data transport much easier/quicker.

I hope these tips make it easier for you and others to better collect your content and display it for later consumption and archival use.

For online material, I use the Post Kinds Plugin which does a good job of adding h-cite and p-read-of (experimental) microformats classes to the data for the things I’ve read.

Because Post Kinds doesn’t (yet?) support percentage finished or number of pages read, I generally do read posts for books by hand as notes with the relevant data. So I decided to add some better mark up to my book-specific read posts and added microformats classes of h-cite, u-url, u-read-of, p-name, p-author, h-card and dt-published. I’m far from an expert on microformats, but hopefully the way I’m nesting them makes sense to parsers off in the future. (Suggestions for improvement are more than welcome.)

I like Gregor’s idea of p-read-status for things he’s posting and will have to see how I can pull that off for posts in the future (or suggest it as an addition to Post Kinds). Presently I’m just adding a want to read tag, but that could be improved to better match the functionality I appreciate in silos like Goodreads. I’ll also have to load up Gregor’s recent modifications to Quill and test them out on my site as well. I know David Shanske has expressed interest in better aligning Quill and micropub clients to post to WordPress with Post Kinds in mind.

It’s also made me begin to feel itchy about some of my past quote posts and potentially revisiting them to add the appropriate h-cite and related mark up to them as well. (Or at least fix it moving forward.)

Incidentally, my real camp project was some heavy editing work on “The Book.” More on that later…

The creative community is still waiting on Patreon to officially address the new policy of passing transaction fees on to the patrons (backers), but it appears that co-founder and figurehead Jack Conte has been calling some of creators to discuss the situation with them. Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist behind Questionable Content (over 5,300 patrons as of this typing. though the number of patrons as been… fluid… for many Patreon creators in the last few days) tweeted about his conversation with Conte

Perhaps coincidentally, there was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday (12/09/17) entitled Payments, Pledges, and Donations, Oh My!. The link includes the video of the session via YouTube as well as notes.

The premise is that many creators already have their own websites/platforms for promoting or featuring their work. In some sense Patreon is only bringing a payment gateway (and apparently not a great one) as their sole feature. The conversation within the session was geared toward attempting to make it easier and simpler for creators to not only host their own work, but to accept payments and recurring payments directly. Some of the discussion was geared at making the payments systems seamless so that one could move them from one platform to another without losing hard won supporters and needing to start over again.

While we’re still in the very early days for improving the technology for this, hopefully some of the demos coming out of the camp later today will move the ball forward. Those should be posted on the IndieWeb YouTube channel later today as well.

For those looking for alternates (and particularly when they’ve already got their own websites), I suspect it’ll definitely be worth a look. Alternate platforms and methods were certainly discussed. The means of control for creators to inexpensively keep all of their workflow in-house is very near.

This last section got pretty heavy into evolution and touched on ideas of information theory applied to biology and complexity, but didn’t actually mention them. Surprisingly he mentioned Jeremy England by name! He nibbled around the edges of the field to tie up the plot, but there’s some reasonable philosophical questions hiding here in the end of the book that I’ll have to pull into a more lengthy review.